


all the other ways

by AptlyNamed



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Asexual Character, Character Study, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, a l s o i played fast and loose w soul marks, angsty... but soft, no beta we die. we just straight up die, so many spoilers but especially spoilers for ep159, uhh straight up just the show but what if soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21514987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AptlyNamed/pseuds/AptlyNamed
Summary: Jon loses his first soul mark when he is eight years old.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 17
Kudos: 596





	all the other ways

Jon loses his first soul mark when he is eight years old.

It’s a crisp autumn day, bright and unreal when he looks back on it. He’d spent the class barely paying any mind to his increasingly exasperated teacher, more interested in the leaves falling lazily outside. The unpredictable dancing of the leaves was far more interesting and deserving of his attention than the cursive he was meant to be practicing, he’d deemed, and his scribbler was filled with doodle after doodle of the most interesting leaves he could see.

He is erasing a line from one drawing when he notices the flakes on his wrist, like eraser shavings. He goes to brush them off, and some of his mark sticks to his thumb instead. Years later, he can’t explain what he’d felt, staring as his mark started to crack and curl up at the edges. 

He must make some kind of noise, though, because the teacher comes over to ask if he’s okay. She goes abruptly silent when she sees his wrist and whisks him off to the school office in short order, where they call his grandmother. He doesn’t say a word the whole way. Just clutches his wrist so tightly his knuckles go white.

Even his grandmother, as taciturn as she is, seems softer when she picks him up. She takes him out for ice cream and awkwardly offers platitudes. She tells him of the relatively high statistic of people losing their first soulmark. Thirty three percent of people’s first marks are lost, through death or deliberate choice, yes, but also in a change of trajectory, falling just out of step with someone who they had once matched. It happened. It was entirely likely that Jon would get another soulmark later on in life. 

Jon nodded along in the appropriate spots in his grandmother’s explanation. Underneath the table of their booth, the words flake off in bigger and bigger chunks, until there is no sign that they were ever there at all. Their ice cream melts, untouched.

His grandmother tucks him in early that night. He stares up at his ceiling a long time after that.

Was it something he had done? Had the person who would’ve said _Oh I don’t know, you seem sweet_ decided to take the words back, or had it had all been accidental? He’s been called many things, by his grandmother and teachers and peers, but sweet had never been one of them. Maybe his soulmate- his ex-soulmate- maybe they had realized their mistake, consciously or unconsciously. 

He stays up late that night, spiralling through hypotheses, going over the last few weeks, trying to find where he’d made the mistake. When he does sleep, it’s fitful. In the morning he feels no better than before, and he’s very aware of the emptiness of his wrist in his periphery. 

He stays home from school that day, and the next, claiming a sudden stomach bug that his grandmother doesn’t push him on. 

On the third day, she brings him a pile of books early in a blatant attempt to take his mind off of it. In it, he finds the book titled _A Guest for Mr. Spider._

*

He’s nearly finished his undergraduate degree when he gets his second mark.

It’s- startling, to say the least. He’d made peace with the fact that he’d likely not be getting another mark. Yet, on an unassuming morning, he wakes up to the words _Are you going to be much longer?_ printed neat and clean over his left hand's knuckles. The moment he realizes what it is, he touches it, and is further surprised by the fact it doesn’t immediately start flaking off.

He takes to idly smoothing his thumb over it, seeing if his new soulmate has realized their mistake yet. If they’ve somehow sensed his abrasive, awkward, misanthropic self radiating through their own mark and have decided against it. But it stays. It lasts a week, then two, then four months pass and Jon… doesn’t trust the mark, exactly, but becomes more accustomed to seeing the words tucked into his hand. He still makes a point to touch it at least once a day, just to see. Just in case.

And then finals week looms, and the mark is handily pushed out of his mind. He spends hours and hours in the library, working on final papers and studying for final exams in turn. 

On one such day, he spends far too many hours combing and re-combing through a single book. There’s a line in it that he _knows_ will back up his paper if he can cite it, but he can’t seem to find it. He’s on his fourth pass through the book when someone taps his shoulder. He startles, badly. 

Standing beside him is an unimpressed woman, hair twisted up brutally and haphazardly. 

“Are you going to be much longer?” She asks, obviously irritated. Jon… stops. 

“What?” He says, air knocked out of his lungs. 

She very deliberately stifles a sigh. “I said, are you-” Her eyes catch on his left hand, where Jon realizes with a start that he’s unconsciously touched his mark. He snatches his hand away, but it’s too late.

“Oh.” Says the woman quietly. Jon’s throat is very dry. She purses her lips. “Coffee?”

He stares. 

She shrugs. “You look a little rough, and I could use the caffeine. And the break.”

Somehow, Jon manages to nod. The walk to the coffeeshop is agonizing, but by the time they queue up, they’ve managed to start a quiet conversation. And it’s... easy, once they start talking, in a way that talking to people never is to Jon. He learns that her name is Georgie, and that she’s also nearly finished her degree. She’s got two other marks besides Jon’s that she’s had since birth. Jon’s had been a surprise. She hadn’t even noticed it at first, as it’s tucked behind her right ear, and even then hadn’t expected to actually meet him given how general the word is. She likes cult films, works at the campus radio station, and has a cat. She has a nice laugh.

They get coffee as well as several pastries, which turn out to look much better than they taste, before sneaking it all back into the library to pour over the book together. They stay until the library closes, after which they exchange numbers. It’s a surprisingly enjoyable day, and Georgie must agree, because even hours after they part the lines of Jon’s mark stay strong and clean. 

It works. They work, weirdly, in a way Jon had never realized people could work. It’s _nice._ And it stays nice, for a year and a half. And then it stops working, stops being nice, in fits and starts that then balloons over the course of another year. He couldn’t see any particular moment that began the slow breakdown- not when he told Georgie he was asexual, not when they decided to try a romantic relationship, not when he’d partially moved in. No milestone felt _wrong._ They just- fell out of step, somewhere along the way. 

He does, however, know the moment it finishes breaking.

They’re yelling at each other again, in the kitchen this time. Jon can’t remember what about, exactly, just that he is right and Georgie is wrong. Georgie shouts something cruel and pointed, and Jon yells back in kind, and then- and then there’s a ringing silence. They stare at each other, breathing heavily, the silence sitting sharp and empty all around them. Georgie’s face is still and terrible, and when she tells him to get out, he goes without another word.

There’s a note of finality in her voice and in his slamming of the door behind him, so much so that he’s expecting the box of his things outside his door a few days later, and the flaking of his mark a few days after that. He’d been expecting it the moment he closed the door, had been looking for it months before that. He’s too exhausted to feel regret, but it is relieving in a way. In the way it’s relieving when the guillotine finally comes down. 

He wonders if the flakes of his mark will catch in her hair. 

Soulmarks, it turns out, don’t disappear any faster if you scrub at them. They leech out at a steady rate, with no way to speed it up or lessen the loss. 

It’s fine. He starts work as a researcher for the Magnus Institute on Monday. He’ll be able to work and keep his mind off his second lost mark until it scabs over like the first. It’ll be fine. 

This job will be good for him. 

*

It’s easy enough to ignore, at first. As a researcher he could wave off the occasional black flake as a bit of shredded paper, or eraser shavings, or some other benign reason related to his work. There’s never any sign of a mark before the flakes, and he’s never heard of anyone losing a mark that quickly. It happens twice in four years, so it really only unsettles him for a lunch hour before being put absently out of mind. 

And then he takes the job of Head Archivist, and everything in his life rapidly deteriorates. 

Prentiss, yes, and other horrific impossible things, and the messy destruction of whatever camaraderie existed between him and his assistants- his life disappearing into shambles before his eyes and he is entirely to blame for it, yes, yes, he’s so very aware of that. 

But the flakes- they’re not pencil shavings, or anything of the like. It’s _words._

At first they come only bimonthly, scattered fragments he only notices when he adjusts his sleeve and some shake out. Then more often, and by the time Jurgen Leitner dies, the inside of his clothes is a matte black more often than not. 

And then it stops. The words come less often, so much so he dares to think he’s free in this at least, of haunting what-ifs. But of course he’s not- occasionally words will start to rise on his skin before fading, like a wave abruptly pulling back mid-crest. 

Occasionally, he’ll catch a piece of a phrase before it dissolves under his fingertips. He manages to read _Do you even kno_ which twists dizzyingly into _trying to draw you a m_ before it fades away, and the implications of that make him feel a little ill. A couple weeks later he reads _You’re new._

He stops trying to read them, after that. Stops looking at them. Buys a lot of turtlenecks and gloves. No one says anything, though he catches Daisy watching him more often. He tries not to buckle under her gaze, and never looks at his skin when he can avoid it. Which is why it takes him so long to notice his newest mark. 

Just after he showers, he sees the edge of it in his mirror entirely by accident, and he stops. What he’d at first thought was a scar from the Prentiss attacks has grown to a full centimeter, too long and dark to be anything other than the beginning of a mark. 

He’s… not sure what that means, exactly. These days, he’s not even sure what _he_ is. It could relate to the Eye, or it could not. There’s no way to tell anymore, where he ends and the Archivist begins. 

Somedays it fades so much that if Jon didn’t know it was there, he would have thought it was a dirt smudge. The unfinished mark aches on those days, as if physically clinging to his skin. He shouldn’t find that comforting- the push-pull of pain as it throbs just below his collarbone. His sleep on those days isn’t any easier, but it’s less lonely in the dark, with the ache of his incomplete mark to keep him company. 

It stays. It hangs on. Slowly, glacially so, but by the time he’s the Archivist restored and two assistants down, there is a nearly complete _I_ tucked below his collarbone. It trembles at the edges, fading in and out, but the core of it stands strong. And it keeps staying.

None of the other avatars he’s met have had marks. There’s no way to tell whether that means he’s still partially human, or whether he’s just a different breed of monster than any he’s met before. Still. It’s something. He clings to it. At night he’ll press his palm to it, though he couldn’t say if he means to try to help it stay or to keep himself from seeing the last bits of Jonathan Sims flake off in the night. 

*

(And some days- some days he _knows._ Not Knows- the Beholding has taken many things from Jon and made them anew to suit its purposes, but this _will not_ be one of them- but knows, in the hours stretching between statements and dreams, whose mark lies just above his heart. In the same way one knows of the sunrise at midnight, of hearths in a blizzard, of fleece on a body heavy battlefield, and all the other ways inevitability always breaks suffering. 

There is a mark on Jonathan Sims, and it has stuck around far longer than any sensible person ever would. Who else could it be, really?

Jon clenches his teeth, and chooses to trust.

The _s_ curls into existence the next day.)

*

“I see you, Jon.”

“ _Martin_.”

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact i got like 80% of the way thro this, couldn't think of a way to end it, resigned myself to adding another half finished fic to the pile... and then ep 159 came out  
> can't believe magnus archives reinvented romance  
> 


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